72. Rerender Albany

 

to express the word | its imprint in a mind | my septum deviated in that city

everything deviated from that pivot | we brought a black friend home once

my grandmother said | “I didn’t know he was a darkie” | I didn’t know the word

our upbringing hadn’t yet | afforded us entrance into that world | I would follow

that line of thought | into the present | kneel down | upon | to squeeze life out of

almost wherever I lived | I grew up under the circling of seagulls | in one of our

four sequential homes | on Barbados | I baked pies as a hobby | or I grew up

at night | reading forever | never thinking of writing | such a small sliver of evidence

it may not be exactly true | reading made me realize the purpose of my penis

my speech marred as a child | tongue-tied | until they cut my tongue free

friends were temporary companions | anywhere I was | I was impermanent | fleeting

in Canada | we lived on the shore | of Lake Erie | so we still had the ocean with us

my mother | and her mother | always worried about money | I tell my story and

people say | because they went through the Depression | but they weren’t poor then

our cousin Toni came | to live with us | always an unstable life | died of an overdose

two drugs at once | we always knew the secrets of the family | this poem requires

certain constraints | including artlessness | beside Lake Erie we watched a man step

on the moon | my paternal grandfather came to live with us | to die with us | just

north of us in Detroit | I have lived in two Albanys | one day we told our mother

we were bored | that day we started to do chores | we slept two to three to a room

 

we collected spent bullets | projectiles and casings from the firing range

at the Navy base | I wish I had saved some | but my life has been about discarding

and moving on | one sister refused to finish her meal | she suffered years for it

in our family | everything was a violation | dependent on the perpetrator and the judge

I never studied | I just took the test | our family was split into factions | except me

who operated separately | age 8 I refused to kiss my mother | did not want to

my father beat me with a belt | must have been from the benefit of reading

words seduced me | but I did not write | I read | everything was local in my world

no matter the continent | are children enslaved by their parents? | my mother broke

her arm by falling in the grass | my teeth grew | through the roof of my mouth

I spoke Portuguese | and German | and French | very little Arabic | no Somali

the question they ask | What was it like to move all the time? | I asked | What

was it like to never move? | I don’t know what that is like | I am old enough to think

I may sometime grow old | my father was a diplomat | but his job was not | Somalia

was the most impoverished posting | we lived across the street from the Indian Ocean

a herd of dik-dik lived behind walls | with us | farther out people were starving

much farther out | we never saw them | my family did not teach me love | if I hear

a panpipe | I remember Bolivia | men playing a tune as they moved their llamas

anyone’s face is merely another mask | my aunt died of emphysema | slowly

my life had many benefits | I learned to read their faces | my life is a line of words

 

I am not sure I had parents | when I perform | I disappear | it is an attack upon my body

my life was filled with pets | with me as their parent | I would find netting at the beach

a few blocks from my Portuguese house | gulls sing like muted sirens | my life I spent

climbing trees | childhood was terror | I used to remember my phone numbers | I am

not sure | snails are disappearing | or I have left them behind | unlike Marx | I joined

clubs | in my few weeks of second grade | I realized I preferred the presence of girls

I talk too much | I go hours without speaking | a man in Tangier | peeled a banana and ate it suggestively | as he stared at me | I have been working to cut budgets | and avoid

layoffs | I destroyed almost all my writing | from before I was 20 | I want those diaries

those humorous short stories I wrote in Ghana | my childhood was the absence of mercy

carelessness defines me | I killed a frog in the basement in Bolivia | a science experiment

sky is defined by clouds | I am wary of people | I take photographs of everything daily

“be, comma, to” | is the title to a sequence of books of poems | as a child | I wanted to be

a machine | absence of emotion | kindness in mechanics | since I rarely publish | my poems are off the books | Manhattan seems empty | during the pandemic | imminent

ptomaine | I have no place to place this word | I demonstrate why | my family seemed

whole | we were chaos | we once left a sister behind in another country | luckily it was

at Iguaçu Falls | my mother miscarried after me | five children followed | movements

I raised myself | to be unlike my parents | yet we remain permanently joined together

my life is strewn across the world | I am not cosmopolitan | just an American abroad